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LAPD records: Fugitive Christopher Dorner had troubled tenure

By Eric Hartley, Staff Writer

Posted:
02/09/2013 05:47:15 PM EST

Updated:
02/10/2013 12:40:54 AM EST

Christopher Dorner, pictured above, is the suspect in the double-homicide that occurred in Irvine on Sunday, February 3, 2013. This recent image of Dorner was obtained from surveillance video of an Orange County hotel, taken Jan. 28, 2013. (Photo courtesy of the Irvine Police Department)

Hundreds of pages of court records, which include confidential Internal Affairs reports, detail a pitched struggle between Christopher Jordan Dorner and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Almost from the beginning of his employment the seeds of Dorner's 11,000-word manifesto, which details his grievances against the department, were sown.

His troubles began as a Police Academy recruit in February 2006. It was then Dorner filed an official complaint, saying two other recruits had made "ethnic remarks," an investigator wrote. The department found one recruit made such a comment, but the other had not.

The court records outline Dorner's attempt to overturn his 2009 firing from the LAPD for lying about another officer's conduct.

(Handout)

Dorner himself said the failure of those appeals led directly to last week's rampage.

"I have exhausted all available means at obtaining my name back," Dorner wrote in his manifesto posted Monday on Facebook. "I have attempted all legal court efforts within appeals at the Superior Courts and California Appellate courts. This is my last resort. The LAPD has suppressed the truth and it has now lead to deadly consequences."

Those deadly consequences include three homicides in which Dorner, 33, is a suspect and as a result the subject of a statewide manhunt. The killings include the shooting of a Riverside police officer, and Dorner's manifesto threatens the lives of LAPD officers and their families.

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He told a colleague he wasn't happy with the outcome of the complaint he filed as a recruit. Dorner, who is black, said he believed the LAPD was racist and planned to sue the department once his probation was over.

His 2007 accusation against another officer led to an investigation, an internal hearing and court appeals that together spanned more than four years.

The court records not only outline Dorner's legal case and his complaints about racism, but hint at his trouble fitting back in after a year of military service in Iraq.

Dorner, a naval reservist, spent just four months on the street after graduating from the Police Academy in February 2006. He was called to active military duty that July and served in Iraq before returning to the LAPD in July 2007.

Because of his military duty, his probation was extended, and he was assigned to ride with a training officer, Teresa Evans.

Not long into their time together, Evans told investigators, Dorner started crying while they were in a car and asked to be taken back to the station. He had asked about "reintegration" training given to officers returning from military duty, Evans said.

"Dorner acknowledged that he might have some issues regarding his deployment in Iraq," an investigator wrote after interviewing Evans.

He eventually completed a class called "restoration training," the investigators found.

About the same time, Dorner's personal life appeared troubled. Court records show his wife filed for divorce in 2007, though there's no evidence one was granted. The pair have no children.

An earlier relationship had ended badly just a year before, when court records show Dorner unsuccessfully requested a restraining order against an ex-girlfriend.

About a month after rejoining the police force in 2007, Dorner made a complaint about Evans, saying she had kicked a suspect during an arrest. Evans said it was untrue, and witness reports were conflicting.

That August 2007 complaint sparked an internal investigation that led to Dorner -- not Evans -- being brought up on internal charges.

Dorner was accused of making a false report.

"The investigation alludes to the fact that Dorner was struggling to reintegrate to the Department upon his return from a year of military duty," an internal report says. "Whether that in some way created the motivation for him to make this complaint is not known, however it does not rationalize it."

In the end, the LAPD found Dorner had lied.

And it's that judgment that appears to have consumed him in the years since. In his manifesto, the word "truth" or "truthful" appears 20 times. Some version of the word "lie" appears 15 times.

Among those he accuses of lying: LAPD officers, a high school vice principal and a port police officer.

He demands the LAPD clear his name publicly, saying that only then will the killings stop. He sent a video that he says exonerates him to CNN's Anderson Cooper with a note labeled "I never lied!"

After Dorner returned to duty in July 2007, he wasted little time telling Evans, his training officer, about his problems with the department.

Evans told another officer about "an unusual conversation she had with Dorner regarding the fact that Dorner seemed preoccupied with the race of officers and the suspects they arrested," the internal report says.

"Dorner continually tried to solicit information from Evans regarding whether or not she saw any racist behavior or if she had been treated badly by the Department," the report says. "At some point within the first week, she told Dorner that their relationship and conversation needed to be geared toward training and not personal matters."

He seems preoccupied with race in the manifesto, too, criticizing some white, black, Hispanic and Asian officers for their own forms of racism and calling them "high value target(s)."

His resentment seems to stem from his time at the Police Academy, where he was "shunned" as a snitch after filing the complaint about the other recruits, his lawyer wrote in a court filing.

On July 28, 2007, within Dorner's first month back on the force, he and Evans went to a San Pedro hotel for a report of a man causing a disturbance. The man, who had schizophrenia and dementia, didn't listen to officers' commands, and they took him to the ground and used a Taser to subdue him.

Dorner later said Evans kicked the man three times, but told him to leave that out of the report. Dorner wrote a report that doesn't mention the kicks.

He never reported the kicks until almost two weeks later, Aug. 10, when he told a sergeant about them. That sparked the Internal Affairs investigation.

Dorner told investigators he worried he could face retaliation because Evans was friends with another sergeant who investigated the use of force in the arrest.

His lawyer later gave a different explanation for not reporting Evans' actions sooner: He didn't want a repeat of his experience being shunned in the academy.

The Internal Affairs report suggests another motive: Evans had warned him he wasn't performing well, and he wanted to get her in trouble.

In the interim, Evans told investigators, she warned Dorner after an incident Aug. 4. As officers were on a call involving an armed man, Dorner stood in the middle of a sidewalk with no cover, Evans said.

Evans told him his tactics needed to improve or she might recommend he be removed from the field. She said she spent 20 or 30 minutes talking with him to try to figure out how she could help him.

The internal report recommended the accusations against Evans be deemed unfounded. It had a stinging rebuke for what it called Dorner's false claim and recommended he be fired if found guilty by a Board of Rights.

"Members of this Department are expected to conduct themselves with the highest degree of honesty and integrity," the report says. "By his false allegations of misconduct, Dorner has failed to uphold those values."

In June 2008, Dorner was placed on inactive duty. In January 2009, a Board of Rights made up of two captains and an attorney found him guilty of making false statements and making a false complaint.

On Feb. 5, 2009, then-LAPD Chief William Bratton signed an order firing Dorner.

Months later, Dorner went to court to overturn the firing, his first effort to clear his name.

But Superior Court Judge David Yaffe found in 2010 that Dorner hadn't proved the firing was improper. The judge noted that such administrative decisions are given a "presumption of correctness" under the law.

It was up to the board to listen to witnesses and decide who was lying, the judge said.

A state appeals court agreed, writing in October 2011: "There is substantial evidence in the record to support the Board's finding. The Board simply found appellant not credible and thus implicitly found Sergeant Evans credible."

Dorner remained a naval reservist until an honorable discharge Feb. 1. Police say the first of the killings was a double homicide Sunday, Feb. 3, in Irvine.

One of the victims was the daughter of a captain who represented Dorner at his departmental hearing.

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